Hello everyone, the time is finally here!
In this thread I will explain to you all how we are setting up the voting for 'best video'.
There will be a Voting HUB thread once voting is in session to keep up with all the action in one place.

So far we've had the judges grade all videos on the 4 subcategories in this competition (intro, gameplay, editing and originality/creativity).
This has been quite the task and Ohem, Klima and myself would like to thank our judges for their efforts, it really helped create a fair way to deal with so many videos.

Spoiler!

The different grades from individual judges are averaged for a final subcategory score for every entry in every subcategory.

The judges will discuss and vote on the top graded entries per subcategory over the coming month to decide the ultimate subcategory winner, to be announced simultaneously with the 'best video' winner.

As we have this source of value of an entry in the subcategory grading we decided to use those scores to seed the entries for the public voting for 'best video'.
We took the final subcategory scores and used them to make a 'total score' for every entry. We decided to weigh the different subcategories differently for this total score (see spoiler)

Making things stand like this in order of importance for the total score/seeded value:
1. Editing and Gameplay scores are 35% each
2. Originality score is 20%
3. Intro score is 10%

As we have 117 entries the videos will be seeded from #1 to #117 on the basis of this total score.
These seedings will not be made public.

We have decided to use the initial seeds for every round. So once round 1 is over, all videos that go through are redistributed among heats for round 2 on their initial seeds. This as to not end up with big disparities in quality between different poll groups that we cant control, like you do with brackets. We do this until the remaining entries all unite in 1 poll obviously.

Voting will be anonymous.Editors and Gameplay contributors (you count as GP contributor in up to 5 man tages) can not vote for their own videos.
I can see who voted in admin panel, dont be a cheeky bugger.
This because when it comes down to 1/very small vote differences on who goes through, you having voted for your own video and the others being honorable dudes is a shit way to win.

We have a lot of entries and with that comes a danger of this becoming drawn out and a little sluggish. We hope to have come to a decent middle ground between keeping excitement and momentum and giving enough time to be able to vote while having seen/considered all entries. Part of that is getting rid of a lot of bulk quick, half the entries or more are shed every round.

We talked about this for a bit the other day...pretty hilarious. Yet awesome.

Really, really happy with the turnout of this guys! Thanks to everyone who put in hours and hours of time, whether it was getting Gameplay or Editing videos, its just absolutely crazy how awesome the entire turnout was. I know a lot of you will agree when I say the other day will definitely go down in Halo history and its all thanks to you guys.

It was insane judging so many videos, but I super happy with our judges and I really was honored I was able to be a part of this.

Be sure to thank Klima, Ohem, Slater and the judges for putting in the work! Its going to be crazy seeing this unfold and I wish everyone luck.